A benchmark to scale behaviorally object-oriented database systems

Existing database performance benchmarks, which were primarily designed to evaluate record-oriented data models, are only marginally useful for scaling object-oriented data models. Even newly developed benchmarks for object-oriented models do not cover the full functional spectrum of object-orientation: they concentrate on the evaluation of structural modeling and retrieval of objects. However, truly object-oriented models allow the incorporation of the objects' behavior in the database (type) schema. A benchmark that accounts for this is presented. It is based on some typical CAD/CAM example objects including their behavioral description, e.g., geometric transformations. Parts of the benchmark are--on an exemplary basis--demonstrated for two database systems: the relational DBMS SQL/DS and the object-oriented system R²D², which is based on the integration of abstract data types in a nested relational data model (NF²). The results prove that an effective support of technical applications is only possible if the application-specific behavior is seamlessly integrated in the database query language as well as in the data manipulation language.